Top 50 Edward Gorey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Books, Cats, Life is Good.”

— Edward Gorey

2. “My favorite journey is looking out the window.”

— Edward Gorey

3. “I’ve never had any intentions about anything. That’s why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.”

— Edward Gorey

4. “The helpful thought for which you look Is written somewhere in a book.”

— Edward Gorey

5. “What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed.”

— Edward Gorey

6. “There are so many things we’ve been brought up to believe that it takes you an awfully long time to realize that they aren’t you.”

— Edward Gorey

7. “A situation comes up, and either you do this or that, or maybe a third alternative comes up. But you simply do not choose. You never really choose anything. It’s all presented to you, and then you have alternatives.”

— Edward Gorey

8. “When people are finding meaning in things – beware.”

— Edward Gorey

9. “God knows, there’s enough to worry about without worrying about worrying about things.”

— Edward Gorey

10. “Only art means anything.”

— Edward Gorey

11. “Interviewer: What is your greatest regret? Gorey: That I don’t have one.”

— Edward Gorey

12. “Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.”

— Edward Gorey

13. “Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what’s important is left after you have explained everything else.”

— Edward Gorey

14. “All the things you can talk about in anyone’s work are the things that are least important.”

— Edward Gorey

15. “There was a young lady named Mae Who smoked without stopping all day; As pack followed pack, Her lungs first turned black, And eventually rotted away.”

— Edward Gorey

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16. “If you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point.”

— Edward Gorey

17. “I have given up considering happiness as relevant.”

— Edward Gorey

18. “If something doesn’t creep into a drawing that you’re not prepared for, you might as well not have drawn it.”

— Edward Gorey

19. “The Suicide, as she is falling, Illuminated by the moon, Regrets her act, and finds appalling The thought she will be dead so soon.”

— Edward Gorey

20. “Vice is nice, but a little virtue won’t hurt you.”

— Edward Gorey

21. “Some tiny creature, mad with wrath, is coming nearer on the path.”

— Edward Gorey

22. “I really think I write about everyday life. I don’t think I’m quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.”

— Edward Gorey

23. “It’s well we cannot hear the screams we make in other people’s dreams.”

— Edward Gorey

24. “As someone once said, originality is not taking from somebody else. It’s when nobody can take it from you and repeat it.”

— Edward Gorey

25. “I suppose it was obvious that The Loathsome Couple was based on the Moors Murders, which disturbed me very greatly for some reason.”

— Edward Gorey

26. “When they answered the bell on that wild winter night. There was no one expected – and no one in sight.”

— Edward Gorey

27. “I really think I write about everyday life. I don’t think I’m quite as odd as others say I am.”

— Edward Gorey

28. “Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.”

— Edward Gorey

29. “I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is – but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems.”

— Edward Gorey

30. “I thought I’d be a librarian until I met some crazy ones.”

— Edward Gorey

31. “I should like a parsley sandwich. To the best of my knowledge they are not in season.”

— Edward Gorey

32. “Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that’s because things fall out on the way.”

— Edward Gorey

33. “More is happening out there than we are aware of. It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance.”

— Edward Gorey

34. “My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like.”

— Edward Gorey

35. “I don’t know what it is I’m doing. But it’s not that. Despite all evidence to the contrary.”

— Edward Gorey

36. “I tend to be rather inconsequential and trail off.”

— Edward Gorey

37. “I don’t think anything might have been. What is, is.”

— Edward Gorey

38. “Mr Earbrass escaped from Messrs Scuffle and Dustcough, who were most anxious to go into all the ramifications of a scheme for having his novels translated into Urdu, and went to call on a distant cousin.”

— Edward Gorey

39. “If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.”

— Edward Gorey

40. “The world may think it idiotic, Nor care at all we’re symbiotic, But I will say at once and twice: I find it nice. I find it nice.”

— Edward Gorey

41. “I do remember with great pleasure, if not terribly clearly, a play by Richard Foreman with music by Stanley Silverman called Hotel For Criminals, which I saw in a sinisterly suitable mansion in the cultured wilds of western Massachusetts in the summer of 1974, and which could be described as based loosely on Fantomas.”

— Edward Gorey

42. “To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.”

— Edward Gorey

43. “Such excess of passion is quite out of fashion.”

— Edward Gorey

44. “You never really choose anything. It’s all presented to you, and then you have alternatives.”

— Edward Gorey

45. “I feel that I am doing the minimum amount of damage to other possibilities that may take place in a reader’s head.”

— Edward Gorey

46. “More and more, I think you should have no expectations and do everything for its own sake. That way you won’t be hit in the head quite so frequently.”

— Edward Gorey

47. “I tend to think life is pastiche: I’m not sure what it’s a pastiche of – we haven’t found out yet.”

— Edward Gorey

48. “Indoor cats don’t lose their wildness, which is one reason I am so fascinated by them. They seem to retain all their jungly qualities no matter what.”

— Edward Gorey

49. “We spend all our lives trying to avoid reality in one way or another. I’ve always had a rather strong sense of unreality. I feel other people exist in a way I don’t.”

— Edward Gorey

50. “I look like a real person, but underneath I am not real at all. It’s just a fake persona. That’s why cats are so wonderful. They can’t talk. They have these mysterious lives that are only half-connected to you. We have no idea what goes on in their tiny minds.”

— Edward Gorey